


before i self destruct

by DishonestTruth



Series: The Rescuer [1]
Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman and Robin (Comics), Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Batfamily (DCU), Bruce Wayne is Batman, Cassandra Cain is Black Bat, Damian Wayne is Robin, Dick Grayson is Nightwing, Duke Thomas is Signal, F/M, Gen, Human Experimentation, Human Trafficking, Jason Todd is Red Hood, Kidnapping, Mercenaries, Mystery, Organized Crime, Original Character-centric, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Drama, Stephanie Brown is Batgirl, Thriller, Tim Drake is Red Robin, Underage Prostitution, Vigilantism, child prostitution, child sex trafficking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 21:46:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29972733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DishonestTruth/pseuds/DishonestTruth
Summary: "Jake lay in bed in his apartment, which sat on the fifteenth floor of Gotham Tower. A stray thought entered his mind, floating in where it wasn’t welcome.I could shoot myself, he thought."Bodies pile up. Violence pools the streets. Redemption is at hand.
Relationships: Bruce Wayne & Everyone, Bruce Wayne & Original Male Character(s), Cassandra Cain & Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Duke Thomas & Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne & Damian Wayne, Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne, Stephanie Brown/Tim Drake
Series: The Rescuer [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2204565
Kudos: 2





	before i self destruct

The footsteps approaching from behind saved Jake. It was what caught his attention and allowed him to catch the downward stroke of a police-issued blackjack. It hit his shoulder instead of the back of his head. Which meant he was still in the fight.

It was his right shoulder that took the brunt of the hit. Which was not ideal for Jake because he was right-handed, but fights rarely held ideal circumstance for anyone. So, when he turned around and caught the attacker’s wrist before it came down again, it was with a numb arm. They were face-to-face, his attacker taller and heavier and older than Jake, so the younger man drove his free fist into the man’s throat, like a javelin, and the man, gasping for breath in a haze of pain, reached for his throat, but Jake pulled him down and slammed his knee into his jaw, breaking it, without a touch of mercy.

The man fell to the ground, limp and lifeless but breathing.

Jake turned his head left and right. Not a person in sight within the pitch-black darkness, but that could change in an instant. The alley was wide enough to hold a car, but catered to a litter of trash that made driving down it impossible. He’d come out the back entrance of the restaurant with the express purpose of avoiding any possible surveillance that had been trailing him in the front. But they must have expected that.

He wiggled his arm and clenched his hand, trying to bring the blood flow back to life in his numb arm. Then he dragged the unconscious mess up against the outer brick wall of the Mexican restaurant he frequented and searched the man’s pockets. He didn’t find a wallet but he found a roll of cash and a burner phone.

The guy clearly wasn’t a pro. Pro’s don’t leave any hints to who they are or who’s connected to them. They also didn’t bring their payoff with them.

He was probably a bent cop from Tricorner trying to pay off alimony and child support. Lots of cops in GCPD made extra moonlighting for someone shady. It was the name of the game, a part of life. Jake’s own father had moonlighted for the Falcone’s once upon a time. It was a short partnership.

Jake pocketed the money and flipped the phone open, reading the text.

_Keep the engine running. Come on my mark._

The only response was a quick one. _Copy._ Probably another bent cop or thug working with his buddy. Partners or friends, most likely.

Jake hesitated at the idea of having another fight. He could win most fights because he was stocky and strong and trained for it. But you don’t win every fight. Someone always has an equalizer. Nowadays, everyone and their mother carried a gun, except for Jake, because guns always caused more problems than they solved. Which is why Gotham was as fucked up as it was.

With that in mind, Jake walked out of the alleyway with eyes in the back of his head. It took five blocks for him to realize that he wasn’t being tailed, but even then, he didn’t relax.

The rage was filling up in his stomach but Jake pushed it down. He’d done the job he was supposed to do. He’d saved the children from their kidnappers. They would have nightmares for years to come but they were alive. But the fact that they dared to try and take him meant someone wasn’t happy. Jake wanted to send a message so badly, to warn them off, but he knew it would be in vain. Violence begets retaliation.

He finally made it to his truck, a two-year-old gray F-150, by walking the seven blocks from the restaurant. It was a risk, maybe, but it was better for someone not to know about where your transportation is. That way, they don’t disable it beforehand. Some crews, like Black Mask’s, were infamous for that tactic.

He got in and started up the truck and took off. The streets weren’t busy, not in the Bowery and not along the Sprang Bridge. It was a quiet night. Jake didn’t like it. Quiet meant something was about to go down. Something catastrophic.

  


Jake lay in bed in his apartment, which sat on the fifteenth floor of Gotham Tower. A stray thought entered his mind, floating in where it wasn’t welcome.

_I could shoot myself._

It wasn’t a bright idea. He knew he wouldn’t go through with it, he never did, but it was a nagging feeling that constantly rattled in the back of his head. He was no stranger to death.

Once upon a time, he nearly went through with it. He was going through out-processing at Quantico from the Marines and spent a couple of days staring at the wall of a Holiday Inn suite counting the molars in the wall. Then the thought came to him. Buy a gun. He went to a pawn shop near the hotel and bought a Sig P220 that he still owned and kept in his home. He went back to the hotel and put the gun in his mouth and waited for the feeling of peace to wash over him as he put his finger on the trigger. It never came.

Instead, he thought about his mother weeping at his funeral and his father falling back into the bottle and he couldn’t stomach the thought. Now, with his mother gone from breast cancer and his father dead from a brain aneurysm, the thoughts no longer washed over him. But he still couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Not yet.

His alarm buzzed at seven AM and he got out of bed for his morning exercise. Hundreds of pushups, squats, lunges, and dips with a few variations of each. He knew the importance of exercise and based his routine on what the Marines had given him. He liked to be fast and powerful, with lots of explosive strength. No weights, because being big meant being slower and he couldn’t afford that.

When he wasn’t working, he was doing something throughout the day. Mondays and Wednesdays were for Jujitsu and Sambo classes, Tuesday and Thursday for Krav Maga and Karate. Saturdays were spent at the gun range for marksmanship, and Sunday was a rest day. Martial arts kept his skills sharp and his body in peak condition. It made him dangerous.

The classes kept him strong. His whole body was strong, vicious and feral like a wolf. Five-eleven, 215, built with the wide shoulders and hips of a collegiate wrestler. He was twenty-three, his pale white skin smooth with a babyface. His dark chocolate hair was in the starting stages of recession, so he cut it down to a slight fuzz. Harder to tell that way.

He was a mishmash of different ancestries, mostly Western European and Native American. He had a small button nose and green eyes that were a testament to his Scotch-Irish heritage. He had a round face that seemed to be perpetually sad. Most smiles were reserved for the slight upturn of corner of his lips, never showing any teeth. He had a prominent forehead, itself a weapon he used frequently, and a smooth jaw that was barely prominent. He was neither handsome nor ugly. Some girls called him cute, others mediocre.

Jake liked mediocre. He could blend in with the crowd easily enough, which made it easy when he needed a quick escape. Any passersby would mistake him for another WASP that had been beaten down by Gotham’s mean streets. In many ways, he was.

Once done with his routine, Jake put on a shirt and pants and checked his email. It was a secure email that was built with privacy in mind by white-hat hackers. In order for an email to get through, it was scanned down by the server’s antihacker and antivirus algorithms for malware or trojan horses. Once it passed the inspections would the email go through.

There was only one person in Gotham who had his email and he had emailed a letter pertaining to Jake’s success, as well as an invitation to talk to him to discuss the next job. Jake sent a confirmation and put on his jacket and laced up his boots. It was time to meet Connelly.

Jake drove ten minutes out, to a parking lot that sat a few blocks in between Finnegan’s bar and the GCPD station in Old Gotham. He parked there and walked an additional five blocks to the office building that Connelly resided in. It catered to third-rate accountants, lawyers, Medicaid dentists and hematologists. It was low-rent, low quality housing. Which was perfect for Connelly because pizazz didn’t suit him well.

When he entered the cramped little office that more or less resembled a psychiatrist’s office more than it did a solicitor for mercenaries, he found Connelly texting someone on his phone. “Hey,” Connelly said, not looking up from his phone.

Connelly was an ex-GCPD officer who worked alongside Jake’s father when he was with the Gang Bureau. Most security firms and high-paying law firms and private citizens used Connelly as a middleman for freelancers in Gotham. Connelly was a guy that was kept off the books for influential players. Jobs that called for illegality were handed off from Connelly to freelancers and specialists at his discretion. Guys like Jake.

Jake’s specialty was at search-and-rescue. He liked finding things, tracking them like a human hound. He used to be in love with the idea of being a private detective like Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe. Beautiful women, exciting cases, and a dangerous life full of adventure. Until he found out that most guys made their living following people around as a tail, watching as they cheated on their spouse.

So instead, he became a Marine, then a cop.

Connelly put down his phone on his battered desk and pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He was in his late-fifties, a short loose man with a big vein-ruptured nose that was common of most alcoholics. His purple polo shirt hid his prominent belly well enough and hung off his body like it was on a hanger. He had short fingers that reminded Jake of sausages and yellow fingernails that were on their way to turning brown. He’d been smoking longer than Jake had been alive, and as a result, the ends of his limbs didn’t have a lot of oxygen.

Connelly had a tuft of grey hair that was balding on top but hanging off on the back and sides. He let it grow out like an old rocker or hippy. Jake thought it suited him. He lit the cigarette and put the cancer stick through his lips, inhaling the smoke.

“No trouble on the job, I hope,” he asked, exhaling smoke through his nose.

Jake shakes his head, doesn’t offer any words. He’s never been much of a talker unless the drill instructor made him. He knows the Agency or the client or whoever paid Connelly will give the man his cut and he’ll give Jake his own cut. Not much to talk about there. The cop in the alleyway, though, that’s something to talk about.

“Someone knew where I was.”

Connelly tilted his head to the side, like Michael Myers when he’s confused. He does that a lot. The left side of his face was palsied. It looked like the drooping of fish lips on his face, but Jake pushes that thought down. It was rude.

“Who’s the someone?”

“Probably a bent cop. He hit me with a blackjack, tried to pick me up afterwards.”

Connelly grabbed a pen out of the cup on his desk and pulled a notepad out of a drawer on his left side. He had a computer, a nice new Apple that he could use for notes. But Connelly was old school. He wrote everything down.

“Describe him to me.”

“White, thirties, around six-one, bald, heavy build, light skin. Broken nose, possible concussion,” Jake listed in a monotone.

“I’ll ask around,” Connelly said.

“Anything else?”

Connelly blew some smoke and sighed before going into it. “Well, I got another gig for you if you want it. I’m sure you know of our former illustrious mayor, Hamilton Hill? I used to be on his protection detail back in the nineties.”

Jake nodded. Hill was a longtime favorite for the Gotham City Democrats. He’d been Mayor for quite a while until Batman came onto the scene, exposing Hill’s rumored connections to Carmine Falcone and Sal Maroni. Hill was arraigned but never faced justice. He was murdered by a gunman on his way up the steps of Solomon Wayne Courthouse. A .45 to the chest and he was gone.

“Well, his son Hamilton Junior called me. He’s a big shot in Trenton now. They say he’s going to be the Democrat’s choice in the gubernatorial race. I know what you’re thinking, his name should be less than slime, but name recognition is important in politics. Breeds a familiar feeling of safety for people. You read about it at all in the paper?”

“Yeah,” Jake lied.

“Well, a few months ago, his son, thirteen-year-old, supposedly got kidnapped. From what I heard it was his Karate teacher that snatched him. He asked for a ransom, then disappeared after it was paid. No kid.”

Jake nodded. Yeah, that was common. It was why paying the ransom was often a last resort for negotiators, because then they don’t have a reason to keep the hostage around after that, and they definitely didn’t need the hostage giving away anything on where they were or who they were with.

“Well, the Karate teacher was sighted a few nights ago at a bar in the Cauldron. Noonan’s, it’s called. You ever heard of it?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. It was one of many dive bars that catered to mercs and thugs that lived in the area. Lots of local hitmen frequented the bar, and due to that fine detail, Jake had avoided Noonan’s like the plague.

“He grew up in the area. So, he knows the locale well. Here’s a picture,” Connelly said, standing up from his chair and reaching over the battered desk to hand him a small polaroid. Jake took it and looked at it. It was a young boy holding a trophy alongside a tall man in a Karate Gi. They were both smiling.

The man has short twisty hair that reminded Jake of seaweed. His smile was less of satisfaction and more of a grimace, as if he was uncomfortable or in pain. His sleeves are rolled up, exposing a plethora of tattoos with Nordic symbolisms on both arms.

Jake committed the face to memory and handed the photo back to Connelly. He wouldn’t be asking around Noonan’s for the guy. That wouldn’t be smart. In fact, it was the opposite of smart.

“His name’s Aaron Pollard, and the kid is James Hamilton. Try to keep this on the down low, alright,” Connelly said, stubbing the cigarette out on his ashtray. Jake looked at the ashtray and Connelly’s stubby yellow fingernails. They had a brown substance growing underneath the center. Jake wished he hadn’t looked.

Jake gave a nod and let himself out. He took the stairs down, five flights, instead of the elevator. Upon returning to Afghanistan, Jake found claustrophobia had become one of his newfound phobias. Doctors said it was a stress reaction from all the door-to-door fighting he did in urban environments. He didn’t like the answer but saw the science in it. So, he avoided the small scaling coffins whenever possible.

As he scaled down the stairs, he found himself realizing how lonely his life was. No parents, his sister all the way over in Metropolis with her family, no friends to speak of except his gym partners. It was almost a miserable existence for a young man such as himself. But he couldn’t really help it.

Jake knew death intimately. He dealt it out on the regular, but the day he watched another Marine open up on his own squad screaming, that moment had irreversibly broken him. All the times he’d been made fun of at school, all the rejections from girls, all the putdowns heaped upon him by his father, forever disappointed in his pussy son, had fostered something dark within Jake.

Nearly twenty-five years on the force had rendered Jake’s father a man hollow. He walked into the station smiling that naïve smile with a hope to change things for the better, but walked out burnt out and frustrated and drowning in a pool of his misery and corruption. So, he took it out on his son. Sometimes it was an offhanded comment, other times it was a beating so violent that Jake realistically should’ve gone to the ER.

It took a few years before Jake understood that he was irrevocably tainted by his father’s darkness. He would never have kids and could never have a girl because he couldn’t risk the idea of him harming someone in such a cruel way. It frightened him to the point of self-imposed exile.

He exited the building and went back to his truck. He drove to get lunch and made his way to Noonan’s after. He parallel parked across from the bar, dingy and boarded up but still operational to the point that the owners probably bribed the health inspectors. Jake got out and entered the bar.

He took a seat at a table in the corner of the room and waited. Waited for the sicko to come in laughing with his boys and have a drink. Men in Jake’s line of work had to have rules, and he had one rule: no children. Everyone else was fair game. He had no problem with hurting women or the elderly, because even the weak and the frail are capable of unadulterated evil.

But children? Children were off-limits to him. He made his living rescuing children, pulling them out of human trafficking operations.

A waitress approached him with a notepad. Jake’s head perked up at the intrusion of his space.

“What can I get ya, hon?”

“Bottle of bud,” he said, wiping his nose as he spoke.

She nodded and walked off behind the bar. He slinked back down and put his hands in his pockets, fingers finding dust balls and lone threads sitting inside his jacket. His hands balled into fists and he waited for his mark to walk through the door.

Pollard was a lot taller than he realized, maybe six-four, and had the long limbs to go with it. He walked through the door with another man, laughing as he did. The other man was just as tall, with a bulky frame and dark skin that went along with a fleshy scarred forehead. They both looked like they could handle themselves. Which put Jake at a disadvantage.

A weapon would be a could countermeasure to numbers. Jake preferred hammers, ballpeen hammers to be exact. They were excellent in close quarters and they terrified the living shit out of enemies when it came to approaching them. Some people froze up, which made it all the much better. But Jake didn’t have a hammer. He had a pocket knife, his keys, and a wallet. He needed an equalizer.

Pollard and his buddy sat down at the bar, conversing with the bartender as they did. The bartender was a portly man with a dark beard and greying hair. He was at ease with the men, getting them bottles of Bud Light from over the counter and sliding it across the table. The waitress caught one of the three and brought it back to him. He thanked her and took a sip.

He watched until both men, distracted by their conversation, excitedly babbled about going to the Iceberg Lounge later that evening. That money was well spent, they said. All it took was a little persuasion and screwing.

Jake narrowed his eyes and dipped his eyes at the pool table. It stood idle, untouched by the clientele. He got up and walked over to it. He found a ball in one of the corner nets, a solid green six. He fisted it into his palm and turned to look at the pair of men still deep into their conversation about the Penguin’s place of business.

It took five giant strides to make it over to their position. Pollard noticed his shadow and began to turn as Jake raised his hand and brought the ball down across his jaw. Blood and teeth erupted from his mouth. Pollard fell to the floor.

“Holy shit,” his buddy screamed as he backed off his stool. The bartender stumbled back a step of his own.

Jake brought his boot down on Pollard’s wrist with a hard stomp, heard it snap, and the man screamed in pain. He kept the boot pressed down on the wrist.

“What the fuck man? What the fuck?”

Jake snapped his gaze to Pollard’s buddy. It was the narrowed gaze of a wolf, of a feral animal ready to attack its prey. The man’s jaw snapped shut and he raised his hands in surrender. Jake looked back down at Pollard.

“Aaron Pollard. I hear you like kidnapping children,” Jake said in a calm tone.

Everyone in the room stared at the bloody spectacle in shocked fascination. Pollard’s buddy released a shaky breath. The sound in the bar was suddenly mute, uncomprehending of the situation at hand.

Jake pressed down a little harder on the broken wrist and Pollard moaned in pain.

“James Hamilton. Where is he?”

Pollard mumbled something. Jake scowled and pressed down on the wrist even harder. “Speak up.”

“Forty-eighth Street. Oh, god please don’t. Please don’t…”

Jake pulled his boot off the wrist and kicked him in the head twice. Once to knock him out, second for insurance. Almost everyone in the room collectively gasped. The bartender looked at him with a grimace, while Pollard’s buddy looked green.

Jake walked out and drove to a hardware store in the East End. There weren’t many left in Old Gotham, but the few that remained were reliable in resources. He bought a new hammer, a ballpeen, and some duct tape along with a box cutter and gardener’s gloves.

When he got back in the truck, he put the gloves on and tested the grip of the hammer. Sturdy and small-ended, with a balanced weight. It would be perfect. He drove to Forty-eighth Street, down Third Avenue in the East End.

It was a third-story brownstone surrounded by rows of its ilk. He identified based on the guarded windows, with metal bars on the windows and the pink light on in the second-story window. A shadow was cast in the light, a slender form mixed with bulky arms and an oval shaped head. It gave away the brothel rather easily.

The East End had always been a red-light district since its conception. Gangs and pimps and prostitutes were the norm for the area. So was human trafficking, mostly by the Cartels operating in the area along with the Russian Mob.

Most trafficking victims in Gotham were either transports from Eastern Europe or Mexico, but sometimes, girls or boys were taken from the streets when the bosses needed an extra buck. An upper-class boy was almost imaginable if it weren’t for the fact that the dad was a state representative. Something about this job stunk, but Jake wasn’t paid to think so he didn’t.

He parked down the block and waited until it got darker. When the sun finally disappeared over the horizon, Jake put the hammer in a back pocket in his jacket and got out of the truck with his gloves on. He walked down the block to the brownstone and walked up the steps. He pulled up his hood and knocked on the door three times.

The door cracked open and Jake rammed his shoulder into the door, slamming it wide open. The chain snapped off the door. A man, dark-skinned with dreadlocks and a Gotham Rogues cap, fell to the floor on his side. Jake grabbed the hammer and pulled it out of his jacket.

He took two giant steps and brought the hammer down on the man’s outstretched arm. Something snapped when he hit him, the man gasped. Jake grabbed the man by the arm and twisted, a basic move they taught him at the academy, and got him on his stomach. He grabbed the man by the dreads and slammed his face into the tiled floor three times, then he was out like a light. Blood pooled on the floor from his destroyed nose. He was probably dead. It didn’t matter much to Jake.

Jake stood up and walked up the stairs. He had work to do.


End file.
